Social media web sites and other content distributors receive a large volume of uploaded content, including audio and video content. Typically, a user on a remote client device uploads a file in a given encoded format to the site. This uploaded file may be in a variety of formats and significantly vary from other uploaded files with respect to encoding quality. Once received, the site's server or server farm decodes and then re-encodes the content in one or more of the formats used by the site. This can be a very computationally expensive process, particularly in situations involving newer codecs. However, in the past, the process has generally been required in many cases because the site otherwise lacks an effective and efficient means of ensuring that content coming from a user's client device has been properly encoded using the site's own encoding parameters. Thus, lacking an acceptable, efficient alternative, many sites and other content distributors choose to receive files and do the computationally-intensive, decode/re-encode process on their own servers. The decode/re-encode process can also sacrifice or otherwise reduce content quality.